Déjà Lu 1 (2013) The Limits of Contextualism. Malagasy Heavy Metal, “Satanic” Aesthetics, and the Anthropological Study of Popular Music1 Markus Verne Fakultät für Kulturwissenschaften, Fachgruppe Ethnologie, Universitätsstr. 30, D-95447 Bayreuth Abstract. During the last fifteen years or so, the study of popular music has increased in popularity within the field of anthropology. Theoretical approaches are however, only rarely concerned with aesthetics, with the ways in which music is experienced and with its relation to everyday life. In- stead, explanations focus on the social, historical and political contexts in which popular music is performed, echoing the way in which popular music is dealt with in critical theory and cultural studies. Drawing on ethnographic research on heavy metal in the highlands of Madagascar, this article attempts to point out the shortcomings of these contextualist approaches by taking aesthetic experience as the point of departure for the study of popular music. Showing how during fieldwork in Madagascar’s capital Antananarivo, Satan emerged as an allegory that served both metal fans and musicians as a means to express their aesthetic experiences and to further reflect upon the music’s unique character, the article argues that the anthropological study of popular music needs to refocus on its own traditional methodologies – long-term participant observation, above all – in order to no longer neglect music’s most central aspect: its ability to deeply move us. [anthropology of music, popular music, aesthetics, heavy metal, Madagascar] If music is characterized by anything, it is the fact that it produces sounds: loud or tender, fast or slow, harmonious or dissonant, but always “enchanting” (Gell 1992) in a very unique kind of way. These sounds may bring happiness or sadness, make us dance or cry, they may irritate us, lift us up, romanticize, criticize, idealize. Music is an art that mediates sounds as well as experiences, and even if it is difficult to un- derstand how music actually achieves this and what the true nature of these expe- riences is: The aesthetic experience of sound is music’s core aspect, and each and every approach to music, popular as well as classical, needs to acknowledge its quality if it does not want to risk missing what music is about in the first place. Without it, it is also impossible to understand why music holds so much significance in our lives – to understand, in other words, how music is able to inspire the fanta- sies and imaginations which guide us through our lives, and how it provides us with 1 The research on which this article is based was made possible through funding from the European Union (Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship within the 7th European Community Framework Program) and the German Research Foundation (DFG). I would like to thank both institutions for their immense support. Thanks also to Niall Scott for his help in translating this article into English. A German version was published in 2012 in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 137 (2), pp. 187-206. 2 Déjà Lu 1 (2013) glimpses of adventure within the usual predictability and repetitiveness of our everyday worlds. As Thomas Turino recently put it: “Much in our Actual lives is habit based and needs to be, but a strictly ha- bitual life leads to stagnation and boredom. We also need the Possible – dreams, hopes, desires, ideals: these are the elements of life that add dyna- mism and challenge and that make us want to keep living. (...) The arts are founded on the interplay of the Possible and the Actual and can awaken us from habit.” (Turino 2008: 17) When anthropologists consider popular music, a field they have increasingly en- gaged with in the last twenty years, these aesthetic experiences of music are however rarely taken into account. Of course, no one would question that popular music speaks to people and that it does so in very particular ways. Yet, in their texts, an- thropologists are almost exclusively engaged with the social dimensions of music that do not relate to the music itself, but rather to the historical context in which it is played or heard. More often than not, these contexts are in one way or another re- lated to the politics of identity construction: Some focus on the relationship between different generations, others are concerned with the formation of specific lifestyles, yet others again are interested in how music serves the construction of certain affili- ations, be they ethnic, gendered, migrant, diasporic, or national in nature. Neverthe- less, the actual meaning of the music is always located in its ability to create social spaces, based on the conviction that, due to its performative nature, music is espe- cially well suited to produce and reproduce spheres of belonging on the one hand, and social differentiation on the other. The music itself, its sounds and experiences, are reduced within these approaches to merely a means to an end.2 Against this “contextualist” reading, I would like to advocate an approach to popular music that strongly reflects anthropology’s classical virtues. Such an approach puts music at the center and starts with by what it is fundamentally characterized from a phenomenological point of view: its sounds, its specific aesthetic gestalt, and the ways in which this gestalt is actually experienced by its listeners. In what follows, I will therefore first engage in some critical reflections regarding contextualist under- standings of popular music, in order to then outline an approach that takes the aes- thetic experience of popular music as its point of departure. With the example of my own research on heavy metal music in Madagascar’s capital city Antananarivo – ‘Tana’ as it is usually called by its inhabitants – I wish to show how and why the 2 See Askew 2002, Coplan 2008[1985], Erlmann 1999, Kierkegaard & Palmberg [eds.] 2002, or White 2008, as only some examples concerned with the anthropological study of African popular music. Markus Verne: The Limits of Contextualism 3 classical instrument of anthropological research, long-term participant observation, is particularly suitable for delving into the aesthetic dimensions of popular music.3 Popular Music, Identity and Aesthetics To show how popular music serves to expresses or construct identities is of course important to the study of popular music. However, to reduce music to a tool for identity formation is one-sided and does not do justice to music’s actual nature. The main problem with such a social, or socio-political, perspective on music is that it grants social processes priority over aesthetic ones. It assumes, even if mostly silently, that people do not listen to popular music because they feel this music speaks to them, a feeling that might eventually lead to identify with a certain cultural or subcultural style shared by those who feel about this music in a similar fashion. Rather, it is implied that people like certain kinds of music because it allows them to position themselves in certain ways within given social environments. At its core, thus, this ‘society first’ perspective applies a dichotomizing approach to the study of music reminiscent of nineteenth-centuries’ idealist conventions, granting aesthetic value only to ‘serious’ music, while considering popular music too trivial to allow for actual aesthetic experiences. For this reason, meaning is searched for not within the music itself, but rather in the specific contexts into which its consumption is em- bedded.4 There are, however, several reasons why the music is ignored within popular music studies. A decisive one, as just mentioned, is that until this day, many do not deem it appropriate to consider popular music in terms of music aesthetics. This elitism also exists within anthropology, even though it fundamentally contradicts the relativist ideal of the discipline. Most obviously, it is inherent to those positions subscribing to cultural critique, which interpret the global distribution of Western music as basi- cally a destruction of local culture and ultimately a strategy of capitalist exploitation (Goodwin & Gore 1990). The enormous importance of this cultural imperialism ap- proach to the anthropological study of popular music is best documented by the fact that anthropologists have neglected popular music for a long time, even though it had played crucial roles in the everyday lives of the people it studied (Agawu 2003: xv, 118). 3 The ethnographic fieldwork on which the following reflections are based was carried out between October 2009 and March 2010. 4 In this respect, Horkheimer and Adorno’s interpretation of the “culture industry” (2002 [1944]) represents the locus classicus. In his ‘Historisch-Philosophische Rekonstruktion einer Geringschätzung’ Michael Fuhr describes the emergence and reasons of the dichotomy (Fuhr 2007: 33-65), a form of criticism that, in its overall orientation, benefits largely from Bourdieu’s deconstruction of bourgeois art practices (Bourdieu 1987[1979]). For a general critique of ‘critical’ music studies and their ignorance in respect to the transcendental character of musical practice, as well as the implications this neglect has for the study of music, see Savage 2010. 4 Déjà Lu 1 (2013) A second reason for the contextualist reduction of popular music to non-musical aspects is that many of those doing research on popular music are social and cultural scientists, whose interests are, due to professional orientations, restricted to social and cultural aspects of musical practice. And finally, even those of us who would happily include aesthetic aspects of popular music in our research are actually not quite sure how to do it. Approaches that have been pursued in other disciplines en- gaged in the study of popular music – to focus on the music itself and find adequate ways for its description,5 or to deduce the aesthetic experience of certain genres of popular music from the ideologies and subcultural contexts to which they relate6 – definitely do not suit anthropology.